Artist of the Week: Eleanor Friedberger

“My brother and I bought it right before our first record came out,” Eleanor Friedberger reminisces about her van, which, thanks to Brooklyn’s alternate-side parking rules, she’s just finished moving from outside her Greenpoint apartment. “It was kind of scary at the time because it was like confirmation that we were really doing this,” she continues, “as if there was no going back.”

Since they first piled into their van in 2003, you could say that Chicago-born Eleanor, her brother Matthew and their band, The Fiery Furnaces, still haven’t looked back. The brother-sister duo, who are known for making offbeat indie medleys with an idiosyncratic, retro twist, have become one of Brooklyn’s most prolific bands in the intervening years, releasing eight studio albums in six years and racking up hundreds of thousands of miles, no doubt.

This month, however, Eleanor embarks on a new chapter in her career. Her debut solo record, Last Summer, will be released on July 12, and the stripped-down confessional songs it treats us to (such as the up-tempo opening track, “My Mistakes”) implies that the singer has swapped The Fiery Furnaces’ quirky experimentation—which used to see them skip, sometimes mid-song, from blues rock to DIY, synth-pop, and a myriad of other genres—for a more mellow sound.

“It’s true, I wanted to do something that sounded different, and if that means it’s more simple, then that’s it,” Friedberger explains, going on to describe how the process awoke in her a new kind of more personal nostalgia. “I wanted to do something that was relatable,” she continues, “and for me, that just happens to be this naive, girly sound, which got me back into the mindset of when I first moved to New York.”

This is best illustrated by the video for “My Mistakes,” which cheekily cuts together grainy VHS clips of a young Friedberger preparing for a date in a once-lost student film with identical scenes shot today in her apartment. Watching her go through the ritual of beautifying herself, one can’t help but wonder if the song, which after all is called “My Mistakes,” is also driven by a hint of regret on Friedberger’s part.

“No; it was just a happy accident when we found the original videos, because it works so well with the song,” she says. “It might have been trying to make some feminist statement, but it’s supposed to be a little bit of a joke.”WATCH: “My Mistakes” by Eleanor Friedberger